Sublime

L’homosexualité n’est rare ni dans la communauté artistique florentine ni dans le cercle de Verrocchio. Ce dernier ne se mariera jamais, à l’instar de Botticelli, également accusé de sodomie. Donatello, Michel-Ange ou encore Benvenuto Cellini (condamné deux fois pour sodomie) sont également gays.

As the offspring of a long line of notaries, Leonardo da Vinci had an instinct for keeping records. Jotting down observations, lists, ideas, and sketches came naturally.

And then there was Salai. He was designated to get the other half of the vineyard. Since he was already living there and had built a house on a portion of the land, it would be hard for Leonardo to have done otherwise with the property. But that was all Salai was bequeathed in the will. There had apparently been an estrangement, one that had grown

Alberti was a major influence nonetheless. Leonardo studied his treatises and consciously tried to emulate both his writing and his demeanor. Alberti had established himself as “an avatar of grace in every word or movement,” a style that very much appealed to Leonardo. “One must apply the greatest artistry in three things,” Alberti wrote, “walking

Rome was a new city for him, a place he had never lived. It was teeming with great architects, including his friend Donato Bramante, who was modernizing vast swatches of roads and buildings. Among his other projects, Bramante was building a formal, terraced courtyard, flanked by arched corridors, that would connect the Vatican to the elegant papal

During this time, Leonardo continued his anatomical studies, dissecting at least three corpses in Rome, probably at the Hospital of the Holy Spirit (Santo Spirito), and refining his drawings of the human heart. Dissections were not illegal, but Leonardo was stopped from continuing with them. “The pope has found out that I have skinned three corpses

Then abruptly, almost at the end of the page, he breaks off his writing with an “et cetera.” That is followed by a line, written in the same meticulous mirror script as the previous lines of his analysis, explaining why he is putting down his pen. “Perché la minestra si fredda,” he writes. Because the soup is getting cold.24 It is the final piece o

c'est seulement peut-être tout près de lui, et cette même année, dans la même région, qu'un peintre « éprouve » une productivité aussi accélérée et qui déjà confine à la folie : dans son jardin d'Arles et dans son asile d'aliénés, Van Gogh peint avec la même rapidité, avec la même extatique passion de la lumière, avec la même exubérance maniaque de